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Howells’ ‘Coll. Reg.’ settings immediately set the benchmark for twentieth-century liturgical composition and led to the composer being besieged by requests from cathedrals and collegiate chapels for other such ‘custom-built’ settings. A generous ...» More

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O pray for the peace of Jerusalem. They shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces.

In September 1940 the Howells’s house in Barnes was bombed in the Blitz with the loss of his library and many manuscripts. The family moved temporarily to Cheltenham and Howells was given a bed in the basement of the RCM on teaching days. New Year 1941 saw the family snowed in. Remarkably, Howells produced a new work every single day until 15 January when he had to return to London. This burst of activity included the composition of a set of anthems which he called In Time of War. O pray for the peace of Jerusalem was written on the 5th, the missing Ponder my words followed the next day and Like as the hart was written in a single sitting on the 7th. Great is the Lord, Let God arise, and We have heard with our ears followed. The music of O pray for the peace of Jerusalem barely raises its voice and is a gentle meditation on the word ‘peace’.

O pray for the peace of Jerusalem. They shall prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces.

Psalm 122: 6, 7

It has been written of Herbert Norman Howells (1892–1983) that he is ‘more widely respected than performed’. Whilst this may sadly be the case with respect to his orchestral and chamber music, it is certainly not true of his organ and choral music. Howells was articled to Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral in 1905. In 1912 he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Stanford and Wood. Howells was to return to the Royal College as a teacher from 1920 and became almost as well known in that capacity and as an examiner and adjudicator as he was as a composer. He succeeded Gustav Holst in 1936 as Director of Music at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, a post he retained until 1962. In 1950 he was appointed King Edward VII Professor of Music at London University.

Amongst Howells’s self-confessed influences were plainsong, the modes, the pentatonic scale, folk-song, his friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams and a feeling of oneness with the Tudor period. Howells’s music is frequently contrasted with that of his contemporaries, Boughton, Bridge, Delius, Gurney, Holst and Vaughan Williams; the young composer was particularly influenced by the first performance in 1910 of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis, which took place in Gloucester Cathedral. Comparisons to Howells’s contemporaries are often unfair and laboured; there are many of Howells’s contemporaries whose music has been strongly affected by some or all of the influences that prevailed upon him. In reality Howells is not a pastiche composer of the twentieth century, but rather a testament to the fruits of the Second English Renaissance, and a fine composer in his own right.

The anthem O pray for the peace of Jerusalem was completed on 5 January 1941 whilst the composer was in Cheltenham and is the first in a set of four short anthems. This work demonstrates the composer’s ability to build up seamlessly to a climax and then to release the tension and allow the music to slip away into the stillness of a great cathedral. This arch form is a structure that the composer often used to great effect. The work is dedicated to Sir Thomas Armstrong who at that time was organist at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford.